“L’Archivolto Events” new exhibition space

Client

L’ARCHIVOLTO

Place

Milan - Italy

Area

200 sqm

Year

2010

Photos by

Alberto Ferrero

“This exciting project, long lasting interior design performance comes to life and emerges from the intuition of its two creators and promoters, architects Silvio San Pietro and Simone Micheli. “Following the first conversations with architect Silvio San Pietro founder of the L’Archivolto, on the meaning of a new exhibition space and its practical point of view, everything immediately appeared clear in my mind; I would have created, for my historic friend, a pure emotional cell capable to excite and get exited, to switch on and off, to stimulate and relax by means of contrapuntal new formal and functional steps, concave and convex, through the use of dynamic light. The space I have created was imagined as a living organism, whose primary target is set to exalt perceptive and propositional experiences, strongly appealing on the expressive and asubstantive quality. It is an “involucrate” fragment of space considered as a Hymn to the city that will come. A newly strong and permanent sign for Milan, the city I love, able to transform herself whilst dreaming on the future”. Simone Micheli

The desire to project the metropolitan user into a highly imaginative dimension decidedly oriented into the future clearly appears from the entrance of the new exhibition space. The door is the emblem, awaiting the moment in which we decide to cross the threshold that separates us from the interior. A solid surface level, engraved like the entrance of a spacecraft, terminates on the top side as a deformation of the surface, sucked towards the interior like a temporal-space anomaly, a sort of black hole which rather than absorbing the light with its enormous gravitational power, emits a distant glow, continuous chromatic change that seems to come from a mysterious other dimension. The door, whose handle is a long vertical engraving on the immaculate surface, allows us to catch a glimpse of the interior through a glass loop, parallel to the opening of the door handle, but placed in an asymmetrical position respect to the latest. In the centre between the two vertical chinks, an elegant and discreet bas-relief engraving: “L’Archivolto Events + Edizioni L’Archivolto”. The door or better said: the entrance, is an essential solution that pre-announces the story of the interior spaces. A solution of extreme cleanliness and formal transparency yet not renouncing to the plastic expression on the substance. The interior project continually faces the blazing problems of the relation between the exhibition space and the exhibited work, resolving them with delicate equilibrium. The interior architecture does not appear in a predominant way and never assumes the absolute protagonist role of the space, but at the same time does not fail to strongly differentiate and to create episodes capable to interact and exalt the work to display.